Introduction

N o matter how you feel about its individual entities or overall force, the corporate world has a major and ongoing impact on our lives. We work in it. We eat the food it produces and distributes. We drive the cars it manufactures. We communicate over its networks. We house and clothe, entertain and educate ourselves with the various items that it makes. Along the way, this corporate world helps shape what we are even as we—through our feedback and support—help shape what it becomes.

In the following pages, you will read about 50 outstanding companies that have dramatically and permanently altered us. In the process, you will also see how the general structure of business—and, along with it, our society—has evolved over the past few centuries. You will meet some individuals with extraordinary vision, courage, and commitment who struggled to realize their ideas and drive their companies to success. In a very real sense, they are the true forces that have changed our world.

Growing up in a family that worked together to operate a busy retail store and a vending company, I’ve been more than an observer of the business world all my life. I have participated in it actively since I was barely in high school. I started selling cigarettes and magazines during vacations, using an ancient mechanical coin sorting device every Saturday morning to count the change from our soft drink, coffee, and candy machines. Later, when I became a journalist, I began as a reporter on the business beat for a now defunct urban newspaper. Eventually, I wound up as a contributing editor for several large consumer and trade magazines, primarily covering business.

During that period, I encountered an array of interesting companies that were doing unique and important things. I enjoyed writing about them so much I turned several related projects into books. As a consultant or participant, I was also involved in the development of a number of commercial enterprises—ranging from a stereo dealership, an advertising agency for medical practitioners, a small business accounting firm, and an Internet service provider.

When I started this book, my goal was to look into the various ways that companies like these could change the world and examine the specific ones that have managed to pull off that lofty goal successfully. To find these companies, I began by compiling a list with the naturals, such as Microsoft and Ford. Then, I drew up another with industries that regularly had earth-shaking impact, such as the fields of communications and transportation. I began circulating both to a network of associates and colleagues that represented a broad range of interests. There were high-tech executives and teachers. Public relations professionals and engineers. Business writers and shopkeepers. Salespeople and retired managers. Everyone generously commented on my selections and most helpfully offered a few of their own. New lists were drawn up, recirculated, and refined. Eventually, a solid list of 50 companies surfaced that I felt accurately represented the breadth and scope (if not the totality) of corporate impact on human life in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Then came the researching, writing, and ranking processes. I began by putting the companies into an order that I initially considered appropriate, and started examining a half-dozen of them at a time. Whenever I finished with one I promptly reconsidered its existing rank, especially in relation to the companies that were then immediately above and below it on the list. I constantly asked myself which had more lasting influence, which really deserved to be on top of the other? And, more often than not, this resulted in a change of some sort. For example, I decided after immersing myself in both Philip Morris and Wal-Mart that the former has had more of an impact than the latter, so I flipped the order of the two. I soon began printing out my most current rankings first thing every morning, posting it beside my computer, and then staring at it throughout the day. Few passed without me making at least a tweak or two as the finished chapters started piling up and my knowledge of all the companies increased. Several times I also deleted companies that I had originally targeted. After examining them fuller, I no longer felt that they honestly belonged. At last, when an initial draft was finished, I circulated the final list among many of my original confidants. Most agreed with the new lineup, but a few suggested additional changes. Several of those were incorporated into the ranking that the finished book contains.

The profiles themselves, read in order or otherwise, offer insight into the often forgotten details of our various cultural metamorphoses as directed by these leading businesses. For example, you will see how our means of transportation were transformed from trains and cars to airplanes and rockets. How the communications evolution took us from newspapers, to radio, to TV, to cyberspace. How we underwent a social conversion through the introduction of electricity and telephones, chain hotels and fast-food joints. The overall picture is one of business and societal alchemy at the hands of a few farsighted people, whose best ideas were usually copied and ultimately adapted into the mainstream. But the individual pictures are even more fascinating, for they show precisely how these leading firms managed to stay atop their changing worlds by following a singular focus, but altering direction as necessary whenever it proved critical.

It isn’t surprising, therefore, to learn that virtually all of the companies in this book, no matter when or where they were founded, still make a big impact on who we are and what we do. I wrote this book, for example, on an Apple computer with the assistance of a Netscape browser, Microsoft word processing software and Hewlett-Packard printer. During the process I purchased a card table and chairs from Wal-Mart, and a lawnmower from Sears. I got FedEx deliveries about three times a week, and regularly watched CNN, CBS, and the National Football League on my cable connection from AT&T. My very first car was from General Motors (1959 Chevy Impalla), my next car was a Toyota (1974 Celica GT), and my current car runs on Firestone tires (although, thankfully, not a model that the company recalled in the summer of 2000). I exercise in Nike footwear, unwind with a Sony CD player, take my kids to practically every movie released by the Walt Disney Company, and when they were younger felt that I lived at Toys “R” Us. When my wife and I first met, her roommate was engaged to a guy from Levittown. I flew People Express for the few years we could. Today, I have products at home too numerous to mention from Kellogg, Procter & Gamble, Phillip Morris, H.J. Heinz, L.L. Bean, Coca-Cola, and of course, Ben & Jerry’s. The most unusual connection of all, however, came when I discovered that the scientist who founded a company responsible for both GE and RCA began his career as a chemistry teacher at the Philadelphia high school I attended a century later.

What’s the point? These “50 companies that changed the world” obviously all made a tremendous mark on the business world, initiating such vital operational innovations as the assembly line, franchising agreement, brand extension, and temporary employee. At the same time, they made perhaps an even larger mark on the world in general, and on each and every one of us.

There have also been negative impacts, as evidenced by giant tobacco companycum- consumer products conglomerate Phillip Morris and wartime armsmaker turned peacetime steelmaker Thyssen Krupp. However, these firms and their visionaries, while rarely setting out to change the world, usually did so in a very positive manner.

And while practically all of them still battle challenges consistently in order to remain on that influential edge, most have faced down similar threats successfully throughout their existence. That’s one of the primary reasons they are included in this book. It is my hope that their stories will prove to be both instructive and interesting to all.

A final note: Several people who have read this book have asked about the possibility of investing in one or more of these companies. Over the years, this has generally been a smart move. Several of them are longtime components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and others have been leaders on the NASDAQ exchange during the tech boom. With the market instability during the latter half of 2000, however, even these standard-bearers have taken their hits. Companies such as Microsoft, AT&T, and Ford have not been immune to the fluctuations in stock valuation that have hit most market segments. Nonetheless, long-term investors can take some comfort in the fact that the companies described here are clearly established and generally profitable. All have a decent chance of rebounding with the economy in a stronger position than their peers. Betting on their future success is obviously no sure thing, but if their past history is any indication they certainly should be expected to hold their own in the years to come.

Howard Rothman
Centennial, Colorado
January, 2001